The Ethical Motivations

The very sad situation you quickly observe working in a semiconductor industry, but also in all places in which researches about semiconductor devices are made, the only codes for simulation you can find are not free and are proprietary codes. That is a very bad situation because, at the present time, if you need to develop your own code for the purpose of simulating a device it is IMPOSSIBLE to obtain an advanced one in a short time, and, trust me, this is EXTREMELY BAD for scientific research... (Immagine if you had to re-discover the Newtonian laws every time you need them...) So, you can find a huge amount of papers describing a lot of numerical methods for simulating, in a very advanced way, semiconductor devices (even in the quantum case), but nobody will give you a code on which you can construct your own method (with the unlikely exception that at least one of the programmers is a friend of yours :) ).

Even worst, if you are a semiconductor device designer and you want to simulate "realistically" a new device, you have to pay (trust me, at very high costs!) a BINARY (just a binary and not the code!) from some well-known software industry. This binary will certainly have some bugs (because it is coded by humans which are not perfect...) and you will never have the possibility of fix them on your own. Of course, you can write to the software house and tell them that there is a bug, but, how many time do you will wait for a new release without those bugs? I don't think it will be a short time...

My impression is that, after a long research on the Web for a Free Software dealing with advanced 2D semiconductor device simulation, there was not a free code for the purpose of semiconductor devices simulation (i mean under GPL license). To be sure about it, I asked to the great Richard Stallman (by mail) if it will be worth to do a code like this and he encouraged me to code it, because there wasn't a code like this as free. So I decided to write this code..